At best, if he can get a grip on quarterbacks, JPP will have a chance to be a facsimile of Osi Umenyiora in 2016.

That still would leave Big Blue one Michael Strahan and one Justin Tuck short.

There are no Strahans out there in the free-agent market, and quite possibly no Tucks either, a stark reminder for the Giants of the way they were.

There is no Malik Jackson, now a Jaguar. But there is an Olivier Vernon, and there is a Robert Ayers.

Message to Jerry Reese: Sack both of them.

And don’t wait, explode off the ball as free agency officially begins Wednesday, because he who hesitates is lost, and the Giants have lost enough these last four years.

Reese has the means, and will still have enough to snack on defensive tackle Damon Harrison, the closest thing to long-lost run-stuffer Linval Joseph.

Trump wants to build a wall?

You build a wall. A wall we can compare to Wilkerson-Williams-Richardson over in Florham Park.

JPP, for obvious reasons, is merely a Band-Aid to stop the bleeding on defense, until further notice.

It was only eight months ago when everything changed for JPP, for John Mara and Steve Tisch, for Tom Coughlin and Steve Spagnuolo, and for Ronnie Barnes, senior vice president of medical services.

They would eventually learn, following an exasperating and agonizing wait, that one of their own, their best pass rusher, had blown off his right index finger and part of his thumb near his south Florida home, had blown off a fortune, a $14.8 million franchise-tag offer, and maybe a career.

The Giants could have washed their hands of JPP, could have turned their backs on a football freak with 8 1/2 fingers even if they needed someone, anyone, to rush the passer across the second half of the 2015 season.

They could have opted to use their $56 million in salary-cap riches on all the pass rushers with two whole hands and wished JPP the best.

But they watched how he returned with a new perspective on life, a young man happy to be alive, happy to be back playing the game he loved. Happy to be a Giant again.

And on Tuesday, the Giants decided they needed him. With the Cardinals waiting in ambush, with a more lucrative offer, they decided they wanted him. Wanted to give him a second chance at a second career in blue. Wanted to give him a second chance at the millions he blew away that fateful July 4 night with a one-year, prove-it deal worth up to $10.5 million.

No one, of course, knows what JPP is now. No one can say for certain whether his offseason hand surgery will help him wrap up quarterbacks and running backs, whether wearing a smaller club will help. But he’s only 27, and he showed last season he can run all day and be a disruptive force that offenses had to account for every Sunday. As charitable as the Giants are, JPP would not have been welcomed back as a charity case.

JPP and CareOne Management donated $20,000 last Wednesday to the Burn Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital’s Weill Cornell Medical Center. Back when his accident first happened, the Giants made a JPPlea to get the best possible care with the best possible doctors in New York. He seems to have seen the light, and better late than never.
Now go get the quarterback, and go get him help to get the quarterback. The way Giants used to go get the quarterback.

“I have some unfinished business to take care of in New York,” JPP declared on Instagram.